Mark Kingsley Brown

In the best Southern California tradition, 1979 was another year for exalting trivia — or trivializing the exalted — in San Diego. The city's news barons and their minions were no exceptions, once again demonstrating their mastery at turning commonplace events into page-one news extravaganzas. Here are the top ten overblown stories of the year:

1) The experience, wrote the Tribune's Neil Morgan on September 25, was "informative and often hilarious, an enriching lesson in friendship and off-duty relaxation ... a reassuring study in Americana. "

More to the point, it was the beginning of an unbelievably embarrassing front-page display of name-dropping and ego massage by the Tribune columnist and associate editor, whose good judgment allowed him to determine that a proper evocation of the joys of being in Walter Cronkite's sailboat required four separate stories. We learned from Morgan on September 25 that Mrs. Cronkite's eyes are blue and "sparkling"; on September 26 that Cronkite is a "whiz of a hymn singer," and that Morgan "felt glad he is on our side" (praise gratefully received by Cronkite, no doubt); and on September 28 the startling (should we find it disturbing?) revelation that the famed newscaster is a good storyteller.

In case anyone still had the temerity to doubt (or the misfortune to forget) that Morgan really knew Cronkite personally, the rival — but — companion Union Sunday edition editors let two weeks pass and then published a story by Morgan's wife, Judith, on the joys of sailing with Walter off the coast of Maine. Her cheerful recollections included fond memories of "spooning out portions of fresh blueberries when Walter started chuckling."

2) When San Diego Union financial editor Don Bauder sees Santa Claus working merrily on Christmas Eve, he grouses that the lazy bum is unemployed the other 364 days of the year. Bauder, no optimist, is the Joe Btfsplk of economic forecasters. Pity poor Bauder; 1979 did not cooperate with him. Bauder raced into the new year gleefully predicting gloom and doom, inflation and recession, stagflation and depression.

On January 6 he warned of the terrible strikes and "looming economic slowdown" that would befall the country. Three days later he was a mite apologetic that housing starts were still strong, but warned, "Clearly, the longer it takes for the recession to develop, the worse it will be."

On January 23, asking if the United States has learned its lesson, Baleful Bauder pondered, "Can we recover from more than four decades of Keynesian nonsense?" and answered the question pessimistically with, "The worst still lies ahead."

On February 17 Bauder complained that it was "still too early to say the recession has begun," but assured his reader that it certainly would be triggered if the price of gasoline jumped to ninety cents or one dollar a gallon. He apologized that day, however, with, "It looks like the recession will be delayed."

Still awaiting disaster March 2, Bauder pridefully reminded his readers that he had been predicting the worst "for more than a year."

"It's eerie. It's terrifying," Bauder said later in March. It was still coming, he assured us. It was still coming April 18. The worst was still ahead on May 9, On May 17 it was "more bad news." Finally, on May 22, Bauder triumphantly proclaimed, "Now that the recession appears to be in the bag .... " But, alas, he Was forced to backtrack in June with, "It is either here now or coming soon."

When Administration figures contradicted his predictions in July, Bauder had a ready answer. "Politicians and bureaucrats normally lie if the news is bad." To his horror, the lying continued, forcing Bauder to lash out against those seeing good in economic indilcators: "In fact, they are either ugly signs of past excesses or scary indications of future problems," he wrote.

Still on the defensive August 7, it was a disappointed Bauder who sadly wrote that "gloom over the economy fails to cause collapse in the market."

But it would be unfair to suggest that Bauder was all gloomy in 1979. On March 31 Bubbly Bauder wrote that "Keynesianism's demise in world economics is greeted by cheers."

3) Did Bank of San Diego vice-president Alan Lord really accept the chairmanship of America's finest City Week in order to rough up a cop last August? Did Mayor Wilson order Lord to "get" a man in blue? Did banker Lord really shove a poor copper? Did Rodney B. Smith, the usually polite cop, raise his voice to Lord? Is Alan Lord a closet bully? Did Mayor Wilson really try to quash the citation for battery filed against Lord? Did Police Chief Bill Kolender try to please the mayor and his troops at the same time? Did the news media get carried away with the charges and countercharges? Tune in next year for all the answers.

4) This wasn't much of a year for gunmen who thought the police didn't mean business, but it was a great year for blood and killing on television. And it was a fantastic year for violence via instant replay.

San Diego's stations showed they knew how to parlay violence into boffo ratings after the April 25 hostage drama and killing by police of Nigerian student Newman Osebor on Interstate 8. In case anyone couldn't afford a Tribune (three photos on page one) or the Union (six stop-action pictures and a color shot of police and the hostage), the TV stations showed the fatal moment at least fifty times in two days.

Then, with that valuable practice behind them, TV news reporters, hair still neatly in place, sprung smoothly into action on August 2 when Sam Brown brandished a gun in front of police and a Channel 39 news crew. Reporter Cathy Clark, diving behind a car, missed the action, though she later took the time to .praise police for what many thought was a questionable shooting. Her cameraman, however, bravely held his ground and shot some memorable film, which was shown again and again and again. In fact it was rerun so many times on Channel 39, and the back patting was so vigorous, that the station forgot, until later newscasts, to mention the controversial aspect of the killing.

5) The sportswriters of all San Diego's dailies, it seemed, needed absolutely no prompting last spring to beat the drum for what soon proved to be a deadbeat team — the Padres.

For Padres owner Ray Kroc, it was the most delightful of springs, He had saved money shunning the free-agent draft and trading high-priced talent like Oscar Gamble. And now, he discovered, he had no need to hire a costly public relations staff.

San Diego's Finest Sportswriters may have detected early on that the Padres couldn't score runs and were shaky at a few key positions - catcher, first base, third base, left field, and center field — but after all, wasn't it more fun to dwell on the supposed inadequacies of the Dodgers and the Reds? They wallowed in Fantasyland as well, hyping imagined strengths (and legions of fans) into Padres pennant fever.

When the fever broke with indecent haste (after the first month of the baseball season) the ungrateful wretches of the sportswriting staffs exercised delicious overkill in lambasting the team they previously had praised.

6) Will Mervyn's move into Horton Plaza? Who cares?

7) The media's contemplation of its navel was one of the year's biggest and longest-running stories. The Los Angeles Times examined the Reader: "Nifty graphics" was the incisive critique offered by reporter Lanie Jones after weeks of research for her fifty-four-inch, double-column Sunday spread October 14. The Times's Jones also granted the obstreperous Ncwslille a brief review, prompting the ire-and an angry letter of protest dutifully published by the Times — from Newsline publisher Larry Remer.

Union reporter Paul Krueger, formerly of the Reader, told us about freelance writers. Freelance writer Bob Dorn, formerly of the Tribune, told all about the fallen Trib in a showcase Reader piece. San Diego magazine wrote about micro-celebrity jack Ford and his Del Mar News Press. The Union wrote a gleeful damning-with-faint-praise anniversary piece on the growing pains of the Times's year-old San Diego edition.

The three television stations regaled their viewers incessantly with the news they had captured the coveted Southern California "Golden Mike" awards — or any other awards, for that matter — and indulged themselves in an embarrassing promotion of the local "Emmy" Awards presentations. That's not to mention the lavish attention spent by channels 10 and 39 on their purchase of helicopters for their news teams, nor the equally lavish Times piece on the phenomenon. And then there was the Union's ombudsman, AI JaCoby, who provoked his readers each Monday by examining such conscience-wracking press issues as whether a particular reporter used the objective case improperly in a sentence — or was it the fault of the computer?

Who read this stuff? Well, there were the reporters and editors at the Union, and the Times, and the Reader, and... A limited audience? That didn't deter New West magazine from commissioning Wayne Swanson to write about San Diego's three dailies and publishing the December 3 story by the freelance writer, who managed, one ungrateful Union editor grumbled unconvincingly, "to piss off absolutely everyone he wrote about."

1. From all the media attention, you would have thought Miss Piggy and Kermit the Frog were on stage acting out Larry Flynt's fantasies. In New York, such lavish cultural coverage would have been reserved for an exhibit of Richard Avedon's photographs of Rosemary Woods and the like, or at least a first-time-ever, in toto collection of Andy Warhol's pop art Marilyn Monroe cartoon strips. But for San Diegans, this month's fulsome coverage was to dignify the "Muppet magnetism" (the Tribune's term) exerted by the" Art of the Muppets" show at the San Diego Museum of Art. It was "Muppet Mania" (the Trib, again) that apparently inspired newspapers and television stations alike to rattle on tirelessly with tedious stories about the lines waiting outside the Balboa Park museum, the copyright hangups on the show's advertising fliers, the parking problems endured by the faithful, and the myriad black-tie openings for the city's cultural elite.

It was enough to make us wonder what hype we'd have to endure if King Tut ever hit town.

9) It was a grim and unsmiling Lee Grissom who marched into the San Diego Union's offices on April 23 with a thick packet of documents. Grissom, the politically ambitious executive vice-president of the chamber of commerce, was upset over a Union column that had mocked the chamber's all-out push for "Project Panda."

Few of Grissom's documents, designed to counter charges that the chamber was ignoring important urban problems while collecting 250,000 signatures to help secure for the zoo a rare Giant Panda from China, ever made the papers or television news. But the frivolous and fruitless campaign for pandas remained a big and often-repeated story in 1979.

Zoologists, of course, will tell you that pandas are really large raccoons. All we know is the chamber's panda hype has been too much for us to bear.

10) There it was, in the middle of San Diego Stadium, surrounded by television cameramen, photographers, and reporters with microphones and tape recorders. It was, to the untrained eye, a three-foot-high, football-shaped, Styrofoam egg. And the reporters were talking to it. Or at least, on orders from their editors and news directors, they were trying to talk to Ted Giannoulas, the soon-to-be-rich, already sued and about-to-be-refeathered chicken, who was squatting inside that egg on June 25.

For the second year in a row, Giannoulas showed himself to be a master of media manipulation. Whether wearing a paper bag over his head in an unsuccessful attempt to elude a Union photographer, or hamming it up on the Tonight Show, or hiding in an egg, Giannoulas found that 1979 — like 1978 — was a year for the chicken.

And Honorable Mentions to:

Lt. Governor Mike Curb's visit to squalid illegal alien camps in the North County's McGonigle Canyon — in the company of wide-eyed County Supervisor Jim Bates and a troupe of reporters and cameramen. "I'm very shocked by it, very shocked. I don't think this is what this country is about," exclaimed Mikey, who apparently had been expecting flush toilets in the lean-tos. A bidet perhaps?

On-again, off-again reports spurred by reliable indications that Congressman Bob Wilson plans to retire rather than run for a sixteenth term. An exasperated Congo Bob finally told the Union October 16, "If I'm dead, I will not run. Anything short of that, I'm running." But that won't satisfy the intrepid political junkies of the San Diego press corps, who will be reading tea leaves during Wilson's Christmas visit home for telltale signs of his demise.

The comings and goings of San Diego "society" (whatever that is) as chronicled faithfully by the Union's Burl Stiff. Stiff's columns in the newspaper's "Currents" section, replete with lists of named-but-unidentified personages, their buffet spreads and designer costumes and copies, dovetail nicely with San Diego magazine's "Urban Eye" to remind the rest of us that there's still a little excess in the world.